


I'll stay up all night (just thinking about you)

by Evpher



Category: Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Cartoon 2018), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: Drabble, F/M, Get Together, One Shot, Raph/Mona Lisa if you squint at the end, it's 2019 and a new series and I'm still Apritello trash from 2012, kind of a '3 times X and 1 time X' fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-18 17:16:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21581182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evpher/pseuds/Evpher
Summary: Three turtle brothers who had a crush on April O'Neil, and one slow poke late to the punch.
Relationships: Donatello/April O'Neil (TMNT)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 100





	I'll stay up all night (just thinking about you)

**Mikey**

Donnie is nine years old and April is eleven and she has barely known the brothers for a few weeks.

Being a latch-key kid, April has plenty of time after her elementary school lets out for the day, and before her parents finish work, to come over and spend time with the brothers. The lair isn’t too far away from where her school and apartment is – in fact, it’s about half-way between the two points. When she visits, she brings with her exotic delicacies the boys have never had before – things like chocolate milk and Fruit Roll Ups that she saved from lunchtime specifically to give to the brothers.

Currently, April was sitting with Raph and Leo and showing them how to fold paper fortune tellers.

“I’m going to marry her someday.” Mikey vows, watching April from across the lair with a very starry-eyed, smitten expression. Mikey is eight years old, has maybe watched too many Disney movies, and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“You’re a mutant turtle, and she’s a human girl.” Donnie monotones from where he’s trying to fix a busted fifth generation iPod that Leo had found under one of the grates at Times Square the other day. Though he hasn’t even hit the double-digits age-wise yet, Donnie is already the person the turtles (and Splinter) turn to when they need help fixing things. The iPod was old, but didn’t seem to have suffered any great damage. Donnie thinks he can get it working again with a battery swap. 

“So???” Mikey huffs, turning and giving Donnie a puffy-cheeked petulant look.

“I mean, think about it pragmatically.” Donnie pauses as he tries to delicately unscrew some minute screws holding the motherboard of the iPod to its casing. He looks up at Mikey. “It’s not like you can go on dates with her. You can’t even get a job.”

“What do YOU know?” Mikey retorts hotly. “If two people love each other, nothing else matters!”

Too many Disney movies by far, Donnie thinks, clucking his tongue and pushing his glasses up his snout.

Donnie is young, but he is not naïve – though his other brothers haven’t gotten to the point where they’ve started to question their existence and roles within the world, the thought had been heavy on Donnie’s mind since the time he had asked Splinter when they’d be attending school like all the kids on TV do, and Splinter had instead given Donnie a long, sorrowful look.

Mikey doesn’t suffer this disregard of absolute truth, however, and stands up abruptly. “I’m going to ask her!” he proclaims, and spins on his heel to go march up to her.

“Mikey, _NO!_ ” Donnie yells after him. While Donnie is maybe at best apathetic over the human girl who recently blundered her way into their lives, Donnie knows that Raph and Leo absolutely _adore_ her already. Donnie knows that if Mikey asks April to marry him, he risks weirding her out, and if he weirds her out, maybe she’ll leave and never come back.

Donnie pauses just long enough to make sure all the screws to the iPod are in a safe place where they won’t fall away into non-existence before getting up and tearing after Mikey. He arrives in just enough time to see April patting Mikey on the shoulder, before she turns around and makes a mad dash for the exit of the lair.

And o _h_ , Donnie thinks mildly dejectedly as he watches her go. _Well,_ she’s _never coming back._

Except she does.

April comes back an hour later and dumps out her school bag in the middle of the living area of the lair. Instead of notebooks and other school supplies, a bunch of dress-up clothes come tumbling out, and April starts giving out orders on how to orchestrate a wedding. Mikey claims the sparkly plastic tiara with the pink tulle veil before Donnie can tell him that that’s not how weddings work, but April merely shrugs and dons the wrinkled black suit jacket she also brought.

They make Donnie officiate the wedding, wearing a threadbare bow tie and a monocle ( _seriously, why a monocle?_ ) Leo is the flower turtle, and Raph acts as first witness. When it comes time to kiss the bride, April gives Mikey a big, loud, smack of a kiss on the nose, and Mikey giggles loudly. April slips a cherry red Ring Pop on Mikey’s finger, and the ceremony ends right there because Leo immediately starts protesting the fact that he didn’t get a Ring Pop as well, and Raph starts protesting Leo’s protest, because he wanted to catch the bouquet.

Mikey wears the ring for a solid week before he eats it off it’s little plastic bearing, and starts jabbering instead about how pretty the ice queen is from the latest Disney movie Donnie managed to pirate.

\--

**Leo**

Donnie is eleven years old and April is thirteen and she has created a monster.

It’s not that the boys don’t all have social media accounts in some form. All of them do. Terms of Service says they have to be at least thirteen years old to use most of these sites, and though they are median eleven years old in human years, Donnie is sure ‘turtle years’ is absolutely a thing, the same way ‘cat years’ and ‘dog years’ is a thing. And that has to count for something, right?

(The logic is sound, but the time Donnie had tried using that line on Splinter to explain why the brothers should absolutely be allowed to watch PG-13 movies, Splinter had given him a look, snorted, and laughed right in his face.)

Mikey had a mostly empty Instagram where he followed a bunch of food bloggers, and Raph and Leo had twitter accounts that they used to geek out about the newest episode of whatever show they were into lately.

Mostly, the accounts are just there for minor outside interaction, and to store things and keep track of them. Donnie doesn’t actually HAVE anything up on his YouTube account, but he has a bunch of things stored in his favorites folders. A few how-to videos on do-it-yourself engineering, some snippets from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, a few recorded lectures on time-space continuum theory.

You know. Average pre-teen stuff.

(Also, some dance move tutorials, but no one especially needed to know about those.)

The point is, they were mostly content consumers, and not really content producers… that was until April introduced Leo to Vine.

If the water bottle challenge on twitter had sparked a 2-week long obsession in the lair with replicating viral videos, it was absolutely nothing when April had casually suggested they try making Vine videos themselves. After all, vines were short videos, barely lasting a few seconds, and didn’t need much editing. Totally do-able for a bunch of pre-teens.

While initially it started out with all five of them doing the videos, it eventually petered out to just April and Leo keeping their channel active after about a month or so. Leo was lapping up this opportunity to show case his wit and talents to a greater audience outside the sewers – and much to Donnie’s chagrin, he was actually quite popular.

The people on Vine had never seen Leo’s face, of course, but that just made it all the more fascinating to Leo’s followers. Because who even WAS this weird mystery homeless-looking dude covered head-to-toe in random bits of clothing, and why was he so goddamn hilarious?

April's visits to the brothers soon turn to April's visits to Leo. If they weren't filming something, they were TALKING about filming something, talking about other Vines, and often times Donnie would wander out into the main living area and find Leo and April laying on the floor with their heads together and giggling, as they edited videos together.

If April _wasn't_ around, Leo was constantly looking at his phone and gaffing over whatever April was sending him during her lunch breaks at school or while she was supposed to be working on homework.

Needless to say, Donnie was really starting to regret his role in beefing up the bandwidth in the lair for them, and had some serious fantasies about staging an… _unfortunate_ accident for the internet router. Especially so, if Donnie had to hear them yelling ‘WHAT ARE THOOOOOSE’ one more time, he might legitimately kill them both.

From somewhere else deep in the lair, Donnie could hear April cheering “DO IT FOR THE VINE!” followed by a loud crash and then Splinter cursing furiously in Japanese.

Later that night, Donatello could hear Leo’s muffled giggling the next room over while Donnie was trying to sleep.

(And Donnie wasn’t jealous, no, he wasn’t jealous at all.)

\--

**Raph**

Donnie is thirteen years old and April is fifteen and she is swinging a wooden baseball bat at a few hoodlums.

In hindsight, maybe playing baseball in a vacant lot behind an abandoned building wasn’t such a great idea. It’s near twilight, and the brothers and April didn’t really expect to find anyone in the vacant lot around this time – the turtles are not really used to the whole being-above-ground thing just yet. It’s the tail end of baseball season, and Splinter had kicked them out of the lair because they had already met their monthly quota for breaking things just in the first week.

Of course, it would JUST FIGURE that something had to happen and mess everything up, because Donnie and Mikey’s team were absolutely WINNING against Leo and Raph. That ‘something’ happened to be a handful of tweaked-out goons who seemingly materialized from out of nowhere to block the exit of their makeshift baseball field, asking if they have any money on them.

“Ok, I KNOW you guys can ninja yourselves out of here. I’ll hold them off while you guys book it!” April had said, stepping forward and placing herself bodily between the hoodlums and the brothers. Her stance is wide and grounded in a way that would make the Sensei side of Splinter proud, and she’d holding the bat they were using to play over her shoulder.

“Wait – what – we can’t just LEAVE you! – ” Raph had started to say, before April silenced him with a look.

“I’m not letting them find you!” April hissed. “I’ll distract them while you guys run for safety.”

April charges at the goons with a guttural war cry, holding the bat like she means to use someone’s skull to hit a World Series homerun and _oh, holy shell,_ Donatello thinks, half terrified and half captivated watching her go, _she’s crazy._

He turns to tell Raph as much, but he’s already gone, charging after April, screaming his own war cry, and _oh sweet Einstein,_ this is going to be the day they all end up in some top-secret underground government testing facility, Donnie just knows it.

Donnie has only enough time to unsheathe the collapsible bo prototype he has in his pocket (stainless steel, and probably not going to last long in a serious fight) before he hears more screams and looks up to see the hoodlums scattering to the wind, and oh thank god for small favors. Donnie doesn’t know if it was the crazed looking pixie running after them screaming profanities and swinging a baseball bat, or if they caught full sight of Raph’s six feet by five feet wide frame right behind her and decided to book it.

When all is said and done, April has a splinter in her hand from swinging the bat over and over haphazardly, and Raph is furious at her – furious in a way Donnie had only ever seen once, when Mikey was six, and had attempted to replicate a rather dangerous Lou Jitsu swan dive stunt from the upper layers of the lair.

Needless to say, the game is pretty much over by that point, and they decide to pack it in.

When they get back to the lair, Raph storms off to his room and Donnie leads April to the kitchen, where they keep the first aid kit, and carefully extracts the splinter from her palm and disinfects it for good measure. He and Leo later escort her home.

Raph is angry for a few more days, but once his ire lifts, there’s a definite shift in the way Raph acts around April. Raph has always had a soft spot a mile wide for his brothers, and things that his brothers deemed as necessary for being in that soft spot. Before, April had just been one of those ‘things’.

Not to say that Raph didn’t like April well enough before. It was kind of like… how while Raph liked and appreciated good food well enough on its own, but when it was Mikey talking about it, experimenting in the kitchen, and creating something and pulling it off, Raph went the extra mile in how he engaged with the food, ate the food, talked about the food.

April was now in that soft spot in her own right, earned of her own efforts, when she picked up a baseball bat, prepared to risk bodily harm for the protection of Raph’s younger brothers.

The difference is subtle, and Donnie is just perceptive enough to know how to tell.

That winter, Raph knits April a hat. Raph is not a great knitter. He’s self-taught, having learned from watching YouTube videos. While ordinarily Donnie is supportive of his brothers taking the initiative to learn something and sticking with it ( _ask Donatello how he learned how to do ANYTHING_ ) the fact is, Raph’s still new to this, and he hasn’t quite transcribed knitting continental style from working with five fingers to only three.

Regardless, April opens her gift that Christmas and is immediately happy when she pulls the lumpy and misshapen acid green hat from the funnies-section wrapped box. It’s made out of wool, and Donatello is sure it has to be itchy as hell, but she immediately puts it on and is genuinely pleased as punch.

April wears the hat all through that winter, and every time Raph sees her in it, he smiles in a bashful way Donatello has never seen before, and it gives him a squiggly weird feeling in the pit of his stomach.

\--

**Donnie**

Donnie is eighteen years old and April is twenty and she is kissing Donatello in her dorm room at CUNY, and _oh,_ Donnie thinks as it is happening, _that took an unexpected turn_ – not least of all because he only came over to look at April’s ‘totally busted laptop’ and instead arrived to find it in perfect working order.

Donnie tells her as much after the kiss.

“Unexpected or unwelcome?” April asks with a smile that takes a stab at bravado, but her hands are trembling a bit as she rubs her thumb along the edge of his plastron.

“Nnnnn – the former.” Donnie says slowly.

It’s not that Donnie hasn’t wanted this – he’s maybe only 2.7% joking whenever he tells her ‘For you, anything.' – but wanting and thinking you’ll actually get it are two different things. You don’t exactly roll out the Scientific Method for things this so far out of favor... and Donnie - Donnie thinks -

Mikey probably doesn’t even remember that weird pretend wedding from all those years ago, and anyway, he proposes marriage to every Run of The Mill Pizza delivery person who says they can deliver down into the sewers.

Leo definitely never even realized the implications of that time when he was eleven and for a solid 6 months everything was APRIL, APRIL, APRIL, VINE, VINE, VINE, APRIL. (And anyway, god help them all, he has a TikTok account now.)

And as for Raph, Donnie knows for a fact that he’s definitely low-key got something going on with a reptilian yokai girl from the hidden city that they rescued from Big Mama not too long ago.

In the now, Donnie uncertainly sets his own shaky hands on her waist, and April grins up at him.

The next kiss is less unexpected.

**Author's Note:**

> Don't get me wrong, I loved TMNT2012 Apritello but I am LIVING for April and Donnie's healthy and balanced relationship this time around. I also really kind of like the idea of April maybe being the first one to make a move in this 'verse. 
> 
> Kind of inspired by Silver Eyes's Donnie X April AMV on YouTube :)


End file.
